Chapter 12 Chapter 3 Triple Confluence (3)

Moreover, if it were not for the existence of open source free software, Indian startup game companies would not have the financial resources to purchase these software programs."If it weren't for the abundance of freeware and shareware in the early 2000s, the cost of software tools would be determined by interested parties," said Rao. As competitive as Adobe Photoshop, the pricing of these programs will be much higher than it is now. The Internet has brought many choices to small companies like us... There are already many artists and designers in the game industry who choose to work from home. It was unthinkable before, because game development is an interactive process after all. They use VPN (virtual private network) to enter the company's internal system, so it is no different from sitting in a workplace."

Rao added: "The Internet has made the whole world like a marketplace. This infrastructure allows us to get the best quality products from the right place at the best price, and it also allows people to share a lot of knowledge and knowledge. This is unprecedented in practice. It is also very beneficial to the whole practice. Economic development will promote integration, and integration will also promote economic growth." Rao believes that there is no reason for the United States not to benefit from it. Dhruva is leading the development of the computer game industry in India. When the Indian market starts to take computer games as a mainstream social activity, Dhruva, which has already established a foothold, will benefit from it.But at that time, the market "will become very large, and many foreign manufacturers can also join in. Americans have always been in a leading position in understanding the development trend and product design of the game industry-they must enter our market first , so it's a win-win thing... Once this market is opened up, those opportunities and wealth that (from the US point of view) lost due to outsourcing will return to your hands at a 10 times return... the dollars earned by India will will bring prosperity to it, give a big boost to personal consumption in India, which means any global company can sell their products here. Remember, we have a middle class of 300 million, which is bigger than the size of the US or the whole of Europe Big."

India now has a lot of English-speaking, well-educated, high-level talents who are motivated and service-minded, but their salaries are not high at all.Rao said: "We are indeed leading the so-called service outsourcing trend, but I believe that this is undoubtedly just the beginning. If Indians think that they can already decide everything, it is a big mistake, because Eastern Europe is awakening, and China is also waking up. In the service industry. I mean, today you can get good products and services from anywhere in the world, because the flat world is running new infrastructure. When people in different industries can take full advantage of the new infrastructure, you will see big leaps. After 5~7 years, we will see a lot of Chinese students who speak English very well come out of the university campus one after another.Eastern European countries such as Poland and Hungary are not only close to Western Europe geographically, but also culturally.So, although India is still in a relatively leading position, if it wants to keep its position, it must work hard, it must never stop improving and improving. "Rao and the Indians of his generation had ideals worthy of American attention, as I will elaborate on in a later section.

Rao said: "We cannot relax. I am from India. India used to be far behind the United States in terms of technology and business. But once we have the infrastructure that can make the world smaller, we immediately use them to the maximum. That's when we suddenly realized that there was so much to do, and what we're seeing today is the result of it all... no time to rest. There are a lot of people doing the same thing as you, and they're trying to outdo you. It's like Like water in a saucer, when you shake it, it will find the path of least resistance. The same is true for many jobs—they will flow to the place of least resistance and most opportunity. Suppose in Timbuktu, Mali, there is A technical person, if he knows how to connect with the rest of the world, he can easily find job opportunities. You can just make a website, have an email address, if you can also use these infrastructures to showcase your work, If people are willing to hand over the work to you, and you are diligent and have no bad transaction records, you can gain a firm foothold in the industry." Rao said that Americans and Western Europeans should not complain about outsourcing, "You should improve Do more valuable things for yourself. In the 20th century, Americans have been leading innovation. At that time, we have never seen Americans complain.

We've always seen them as leaders, and we've learned a lot from the Americans.We’ve learned to be aggressive when it comes to selling ourselves, which was unthinkable in the past because we were so heavily influenced by British culture.” My brain is in a mess.Before saying goodbye to Rao I asked him, in general, what do you mean? "I mean, what's happening right now is just the tip of the iceberg... what's really needed is for everyone to realize that there has been a fundamental change in the way people do business. Everyone has to improve and be able to compete. Look, Dhruva just ordered a baseball cap from a Sri Lankan manufacturer as a giveaway."

"Not customized from the factory in Bangalore?" I asked. Rao said: "No. Although Bangalore is one of India's important clothing export centers, among the three or four cap manufacturers that quoted us, the Sri Lankan manufacturers provide the best quality and cheapest products. We are very happy with this deal. Satisfied. This situation will continue to improve. If you feel the infinite energy of Indians, it is because we have been the underdogs. We have the motivation to move forward..India will become a superpower and we will be the rulers .” "Rule over whom?" I asked.

Rao was also amused by the word he had chosen.He said: "India is not about ruling anyone, that's the key, there will be no more rulers like that. Now it's about creating a good opportunity for yourself, take that opportunity and keep creating more for yourself. new opportunities. I think today, this kind of 'domination' should be about efficiency, it's about cooperation, competitiveness and how to be a good player... The world is now a football field, you have to be in the team Be good at it. If you're not good enough, you better sit there and watch the game. That's it."

How to say Zoppies in Chinese Just like Bangalore 10 years ago, the easiest place to find Zoppies in Beijing today is the visa office of the US embassy. In Beijing in the summer of 2004, I found that Chinese students who applied to study or work in the United States even set up a special chat room on the Internet. worked.They even gave American diplomats nicknames like "Amazon" (also referring to tall, strong women), "big tall bald guy" and "handsome guy".An official at the US embassy in China told me that on the first day of work, a newly appointed visa officer interviewed all the students and got exactly the same answer because they all followed the advice in the chat room-"I went to the United States because I wanted to become a famous professor".After listening to such an answer all day, the visa officer was surprised to hear this answer the next day, "My mother lost a leg. Although she has a prosthetic leg, I hope to learn how to give her a leg in the United States." Get a better prosthetic."The visa officer was delighted to hear a different answer and said to the boy, "This is the best story I've heard all day, I really adore you and I'll give you a visa." You can Guess that.The next day, when dozens of students appeared in front of the visa officer one by one, they all answered that they wanted to go to the United States to install better artificial limbs for their mother.

Talking to officials at the U.S. embassy in China, I quickly realized that they actually had mixed feelings about issuing visas to these students.On the one hand, they are very happy to see that so many Chinese people want to study and work in the United States. On the other hand, they also want to warn their children: Do you realize the challenges you will face? Did you know that the playing field has been leveled and the doors wide open?As one U.S. embassy official put it: “What is happening in China is what has been happening elsewhere in Asia for the past few decades—technological prosperity and local people’s energy. I’ve seen this before, and these changes are happening in China now.”

In the spring of 2004, I went to Yale while I was at Eli.When walking near the Yale statue, two Chinese-speaking tour groups walked by, and there were tourists of all ages in the tour group.Chinese people have already started to travel around the world in groups. With the further opening up of Chinese society, Chinese tourists are likely to change the tourism industry of the whole world. But Chinese people don't visit Yale just to show admiration.We can take a look at the data of Yale University: only 71 graduate students and undergraduates in the graduating class in the fall of 1985 were Chinese, and 1 was a Soviet citizen; in the graduating class in the fall of 2003, there were already 297 Chinese graduates and 23 Russian graduates The total number of international students at Yale University increased from 836 in the graduating class in the fall of 1985 to 1,775 in the fall of 2003; 276 people in the graduating class, Russia increased from 18 to 30 people.

In 1999, Liu Yiting, a girl from Chengdu, China, won a full scholarship to Harvard University.Her parents wrote the process of training their daughter to study at Harvard in a book "Harvard Girl Liu Yiting", which provides "a method that has been scientifically verified".The book is a bestseller in China, with 3 million copies sold in 2003.Since then, similar books have appeared in the Chinese book market, telling you how to get your children to study in Columbia, Oxford or Cambridge. Although many Chinese aspire to study at Harvard or Yale alone, they are also working hard to build domestic universities. In 2004, I was invited to speak at the 150th anniversary celebration of Washington University in St. Louis, a school that has always excelled in science and engineering.Before the ceremony, I met Mark, the school's trustee.Layton chatting together.He mentioned that in the spring of 2001 he accepted an invitation (along with academic elites from the United States and other countries) to attend one of China's best universities, Tsinghua University, to celebrate its 90th anniversary.He said the invitation baffled him at first: Why would any university celebrate its 90th anniversary — and not its centennial? Layton thought to himself, "Maybe this is a Chinese tradition?" But when he got to Tsinghua University, he knew the answer.They invited more than 10,000 academic elites from all over the world to participate in the ceremony, with the purpose of announcing that "Tsinghua University will enter the list of top universities in the world at the centennial anniversary".As Layton explained to me later in an e-mail, “The celebration also featured Chinese state leaders and the mayor of Beijing, and everyone believed that the government’s investment in Tsinghua University would be fruitful. Tsinghua University has It is the best science and technology college in China, and their motivation for setting up this 10-year goal is obvious - to promote technological innovation in China." Just when China was succeeding, Microsoft Chairman Bill.Gates told me, (ovarian "Birth decides destiny" The rules of the lottery have changed, as has the relationship between geography and individual talent. "Thirty years ago, if you had the choice between being a genius in Mumbai or the suburbs of Shanghai or being an ordinary person in Poughkeepsie, New York, you would have chosen Poughkeepsie, because here you can More opportunities to live a decent life, even if you're mediocre.Gates said that as the world flattened and many people could enjoy fair opportunities anywhere in the world, individual talent began to matter more than geography. "Right now, I'd rather be a genius born in China than an ordinary guy born in Poughkeepsie," he said. This is what happened when the Berlin Wall became the high street of Berlin, where three billion people came together with new tools for the courage to collaborate.Gates said: "We can now develop and utilize five times as many human resources as in the past." From Russia With Love While I didn't have the opportunity to visit Russia and interview Russian jerky for this book, I did my best.I let my friend Thomas.Pickering—a former U.S. ambassador to Moscow who is now Boeing's vice president for international cooperation—explained to me something I had heard: Boeing hired a Russian engineer who had worked at the Mikoyan Design Bureau in the former Soviet Union. personnel to help design the next generation of airliners. Pickering told me the following story.Beginning in 1991, Boeing began handing over some work to Russian scientists in order to take advantage of their expertise in aerodynamics and aerospace alloys. Today, Boeing has 400 Russian scientists working on a range of complex scientific and mathematical problems. In 1998, Boeing established an aeronautical engineering design office directly in Moscow, which is located on the 12-story building built by McDonald's in Moscow.It is worth mentioning that the building was built by McDonald's before the collapse of the Soviet Union with rubles earned from selling Big Macs - McDonald's has promised not to take this money out of the country. "Seven years later, Boeing has employed 800 Russian technologists, and we intend to increase that number to 1,000, maybe 1,500," Pickering said, explaining that Boeing and different Aeroflot signed the agreement, and these companies, which have been known for making fighter jets during the Cold War, such as Ilyushin, Tupolev and Sukhoi, provide specialized services for different projects of Boeing.Aircraft design software produced in France allowed the Russian engineers to work with their colleagues in the United States to develop computer-aided aircraft designs. Boeing has established a 24-hour working system, which includes two shifts in Moscow and one shift in the United States."Fibre-optic cables, advanced compression technology and aerospace workflow software allow them to send designs from Moscow to the U.S.," Pickering said. Boeing has videoconferencing facilities on every floor of its Moscow office, so Moscow If engineers have a problem and need to discuss it with their American colleagues, they can have a face-to-face conversation instead of relying on email. Boeing's outsourcing of aircraft design to Moscow used to be an experiment, a sideline; but with the shortage of aeronautical engineers in the US today, it's a necessity.It is precisely because Boeing combines these low-wage cost Russian engineers with high-cost American design teams that Boeing can match its rival Airbus, which is heavily subsidized by European governments and has Many Russian engineers were also employed.The hourly wage cost of an American aviation designer is $120, while the salary of a Russian engineer is only 1/3 of that. But the person who accepts outsourcing can also be an outsourcer. Russian engineers have outsourced part of the Boeing work to Bengaluru-based Hindustan Aeronautics, which is responsible for digitizing the plane's design to make it easier to get the plane into production.In the past, Pickering explained, Boeing would say to its Japanese subcontractors: "We'll give you the blueprints for the Boeing 777 wing, you'll build it, and then you'll buy the whole plane from us." , it’s a win-win.” Today, Boeing will say to Japan's Mitsubishi: "This is the parameter of the new 7E7 aircraft wing. You not only have to design the finished product, but also be responsible for the production." But the wage cost of Japanese engineers is very high.What was the result? Mitsubishi outsourced the 7E7's wing design to Russian designers who worked on the rest of the 7E7. At the same time, some Russian engineers and scientists have also set up their own companies, and Boeing is considering buying shares in these companies. All this outsourcing is aimed at making planes cheap and quick to design and build so Boeing can spend money developing a new generation of planes and taking on the challenge of Airbus.Under triple rendezvous, Boeing now takes just 11 days to produce a 737, compared to 28 days a few years ago. Boeing can develop a new generation of aircraft in just 3 days because all parts are designed and assembled by computer, and Boeing's global supply chain also allows it to transfer parts from one factory to another in time. To get the best deals on parts and other suppliers, Boeing now conducts regular "reverse auctions" (reverse auctions), suppliers should continue to lower prices instead of raising prices.They bid on everything from toilet paper used in Boeing factory bathrooms to inventory of commodity parts.Boeing announces the auction on a specially designed website at a certain time, starts by giving what it thinks is a fair price, and then looks online for all bids from participating suppliers.The bidders were all pre-approved by Boeing, and each party could see the other's bids online. "You can really see the pressure of competition in the market, it's like watching a horse race," Pickering said. Another version of Triple Confluence I had listened to Bill.Bradley told the story of an upper-class woman in the United States who went to San Francisco from Boston for the first time. After she returned to her home, a friend asked her how she felt about San Francisco. The sea is too far." The perceptions and predispositions that a person already has in his head have a great influence on the way he sees things, which may explain why many people miss the Triple Confluence.While everything is happening before their eyes, their minds are elsewhere.And 3 other things just happened to come together to create this smoke bomb. The first was the bursting of the dot-com bubble that began in March 2001.Like I said before, a lot of people mistakenly equated the dot-com boom with globalization, so when the dot-com bubble burst, many dot-com companies and their supporters went bankrupt, and these people thought that globalization also bust. The sudden demise of Dogfood.com and 10 similar sites (promising to deliver 10 pounds of dog food to your door in 30 minutes) proves that globalization and the IT revolution are flashy things. This is purely stupid thinking.Those who think that globalization equals the dot-com boom, and that the dot-com bust marks the end of globalization, are dead wrong.Furthermore, the bursting of the Internet bubble actually promoted the transformation of globalization into a super mode, because companies had to resort to outsourcing and offshoring in order to save limited capital.This lays the groundwork for the arrival of the era of Globalization 3.0.From the dot-com bust to today, Google has grown from processing about 100 million searches a day to today's roughly 250 million searches, only 1/3 of which happen in the US and the rest in the rest of the world.It grew from 1,200 employees in early 2000 to 6,300 in 2004 as the eBay auction model became globalized.This is all happening at a time when globalization is considered to be "over".Figures provided by Nielsen Internet Rating Company in the United States show that between 2000 and 2004, the global Internet usage rate also increased by 125%, of which Africa increased by 186%, Latin America increased by 209%, Europe increased by 124%, and North America increased by 105%. In addition to the bursting of the dot-com bubble, there were two other factors that kept the triple convergence from being seen.The most important factor is "9.11", which formed a big blow to the American political system, followed by sending troops to Afghanistan and Iraq. In the smoke of war and the endless debate on network TV, the triple convergence is naturally easily dismissed. People ignore.There is also the Enron corporate governance scandal and the subsequent Tyco and WorldCom incidents, which left the company's CEO and the Bush administration nowhere to hide.Although chief executives are found guilty until proven innocent, the Bush administration, which has traditionally favored big business, has also become wary of showing undue concern for big business in public. In the spring of 2004, I met the executive of a large American technology company. He came to Washington to lobby the government to provide more federal funds to the National Natural Science Foundation of China, so as to help the American industry build a more solid foundation.I asked him why the government didn't call a meeting of CEOs to show the importance of this matter, and he shook his head and said only one word - "Enron". The result is: in the process of flattening the world, the triple convergence is also reshaping the overall global business environment, requiring us and other Western developed countries to make many important adjustments, but American politicians not only failed to tell This point of the public, on the contrary, confuses the public.In the 2004 U.S. election, the Democratic Party debated whether the North American Free Trade Agreement was beneficial to the United States, and the Bush administration hurriedly blocked N. Gregory, the chairman of the White House President's Council of Economic Advisers.Mankiw's mouth.This is because Mankiw, the author of a best-selling economics textbook, once boldly endorsed outsourcing, saying that outsourcing is "the latest proof of the view that 'trade can benefit both parties' that economists have agreed with since Adam Smith. .This is a new way of international trade".Mankiw's comments sparked a new contest to see who could deliver the most ludicrous response.The winner is White House spokesman Dennis.Hansted, he said that Mankiw's theory "does not stand up to the most basic tests of economics."Dennis, what is this test you speak of?Poor Mankiw hasn't been seen much since. For all these reasons, most people miss the triple confluence.There are indeed big changes happening now, but not everyone in the US and Europe is paying attention to them. I also ignored this before my visit to India in early 2004, although I had some hints that something big was afoot.One of the most thoughtful business leaders I have referred to over the years is Nobuyuki Idei, chairman of Sony Corporation.As long as he speaks, I will listen attentively. We met twice in 2004, and each time I was impressed by his English with a strong Japanese accent.Nobuyuki Idei said that our business technology world is undergoing major changes, and one day people will say that this change is "like a meteor hitting the earth and killing all the dinosaurs."Fortunately, business at the forefront of global technology is changing until now, and the best companies in the world, like Southwest Airlines, are quietly adapting to these changes to keep themselves from becoming extinct dinosaurs. When I first started writing this book, I sometimes felt like I was in the Twilight Zone at Disney World in Florida, where I would go around interviewing CEOs and technologists of major corporations in the US and other countries , they will describe to me instances of triple confluence in their own way.But most of them don't tell the public or politicians about it for the reasons I explained above.They're either too distracted, too focused on their careers, or they just don't have the guts to do so.They all know the secret - but no one wants to tell the kids that. Here's what no one wants to tell you: this new flat world platform under the influence of the triple confluence has begun to destroy our walls, ceilings and floors.That is, the world is connected by fiber optic cables, the Internet, workflow software, etc., and the walls that prevent cooperation have been demolished.People never imagined they could work together, jobs that people never imagined would move between countries, and many of the traditional high walls are gone now.The same platform has lifted our ceilings.It never occurred to individuals to be able to upload their own opinions to a blog, or to upload a new political vision, or to upload an encyclopedia, or to upload a new piece of software. People are suddenly discovering that, as individuals, they can have a global impact on the world.With the traditional ceiling gone, people are able to break through and succeed in ways previously unimaginable.Then, finally, the floor disappeared. Thanks to the rise of the search industry, people are now able to drill down to find facts, quotes, history, and personal data about strangers they've never met.Gone is the traditional hard concrete floor that prevents us from digging deep into anything or anyone, past or present. Indeed, these walls, ceilings, and floors gradually disappeared over a period of time.Flattening originated in the second half of the 1980s, but under the action of the triple confluence, flattening has reached a critical stage of concentration, involving so many people and places. So let me leave you with the following thought: Do you remember the "IT revolution" that the business press has been touting for the past 20 years?Sorry, that was just the prologue.The past 20 years have simply been about casting, honing and distributing all the new tools for collaboration and connection.Now the real IT revolution is about to begin - just when the complements of these tools are also starting to come together.It was Hewlett-Packard's Carly who was able to cut through the fog and define the moment exactly.Fiorina, who declared in a public speech back in 2004 that the dot-com boom and bust was just "the end of the beginning" and that the past 25 years have been a "warm-up act" for tech, now we're entering the main phase, "By major stage, I mean the era in which technology can change business, life and every aspect of society."